RD 3 Ch 19

Chapter 19

I threw myself to the side, rolling out of the way, only for another foot to try and catch me off balance. I scrambled only for one of its talons to catch my thigh and cleave my leg clean off.

The pain was excruciating, but I had experienced worse. 

Scrambling to my hands and knee, I threw myself forward into a tumble that rolled me onto my single leg and then launched myself as high as I could in the air. It seemed being directly under the T-Rex was the last place I actually wanted to be.

It came for me again, its maw opened wide, only for me to activate the Blood Hex on its throat. It froze mid-bite, a wheezing noise coming out of its massive maw and its eyes opening wide. The inscription was currently creating a massive vacuum in the middle of its throat.

Chew on that.

It was stunned enough for me to throw one of my swords into the dinosaur’s mouth, melting away into another inscription that I used to connect to my other blade.

Grabbing the sword with both hands, I swung around underneath its chest, the inscription would tether a sort of gravitational attraction to my sword and I used that to swing up onto its back.

The T-Rex bucked, jumping and trying to throw me. 

I pulled out the B-ranked sword that had Drop and every time it tossed me up into the air on its back, I activated the ability with my crimson sword pointed down. The third time, I managed to pierce deep enough into its hide that I wasn't going to go anywhere soon.

Seeing that it's trashing failed, it whipped around and tried to crush me between its teeth. The gigantic mouth looming over me in an instant while I was running out of options. 

In that moment, going from staring down its gullet, trying to think of a new plan, my vision snapped and changed to staring at Merlin.

I stumbled forward on a single leg, suddenly missing the crimson sword that had been stuck in the T-Rex's back and grabbed Merlin around the waist with my arm to steady myself. Only then did I realize how thin she was underneath those robes, at least her waist was. I could immediately tell there was a decent flare at her hips. 

Merlin seemed just as surprised as I was, blinking several times before her face got serious. "Are you done yet?" She grabbed my arm and pulled it off of her waist only to hold on to me to keep me steady given that I only had one leg. 

"What, you're gonna be mad that I used you to keep balance?" I stared back at her in complete denial that I had been evaluating her figure. 

"I'm mad that you were feeling up my hips." She pursed her lips and then gave me a once-over. "Your leg!" 

"Yeah, that kind of happens when you play do-si-do with a monster like that." Though even as I was talking, regeneration had already done some work, the blood had stopped and it was slowing growing back. I had a knee and a stub stretching out below it. In a few minutes, I'd have a whole leg again. 

"Oh," she sat me down and instead stared at my leg. That was a welcome change from her being upset at me. "This is an incredible regeneration. You really are like a vampire." 

"Not a vampire," I asserted. "More like a berserker that has some blood-related abilities." 

Merlin raised my brow. "But you had said, it's a thing, one of your…”

“Simone, she's one of the ladies you saw me walk in with, she jokes that I'm a vampire. Because I have a thing with blood, too." I explained.

Merlin raised an eyebrow. "Most initiated are supernaturally strong and fast, but if you have a thing about blood and you also have this level of regeneration, a vampire fits. What's the name of your class?" She asked, and for the first time, I felt her inspect me. 

I brushed it aside, only causing her eyes to widen further. "You know, most people think it's rude to inspect others," I said. 

"Didn't seem to bother you when you were looking through my skill list," Merlin huffed.

"Well, I mind.”

“And I mind, too," Merlin added. "Don't inspect me again." 

Only for me to glance around and try to change the subject. "Where exactly are we?" 

"Twenty miles from where we just were," Merlin murmured. "I was curious how far I could teleport us in this space. Turns out, pretty far, especially since we’re inside an object that could fit on a stage." 

The forest looked much the same as it had since we'd entered. Towering pines dominated the landscape and choked out most of the underbrush underneath, instead leaving a fine layer of pine needles covering the floor.

I stared down at the pine needles, a thought occurring to me. "You should probably not play with fire," I said, "unless you have very good control over it." 

Merlin raised an eyebrow, looking at the dry needles and nodded. "The resin and needles are quite flammable," she agreed. "But given what we just experienced, I think we have other more pressing concerns. It seems, for the first time in a long while, I am not the apex predator."

"And here I didn't know you were vicious enough to be considered a predator," I chuckled. 

Merlin gave me a flat look. "When you have strength like mine, rarely can you be considered anything but the dominant one in the pecking order." 

I shrugged. "Well, if you're worried about finding a safe place to sleep, I can assure you I can easily make one. It's not too hard for me to make the inscriptions needed to hide us even from a monster like that T-Rex."

"Oh? Are you an inscriptionist like Da Vinci?" Merlin asked. 

I scoffed. "Like him? No, he is nothing compared to me. That senile old man couldn't improvise an inscription to save his life."

Merlin frowned. "He doesn't need to improvise. He has a stash of them so deep, he always seems to have one for every occasion."

"Exactly the problem." I threw my hands up in the air. "He has one for every occasion, thus he never has to learn or be flexible in how to use them. He's so rigid in his application, of course he couldn't figure out the vault."

A small smile tugged at Merlin's lips. "He was quite bitter about it. Even coming to me to ask for my help. Which you must know is an incredible rarity."

I had a smug grin on my face. "I figured it out in about five minutes."

"And why'd it take so long for Vincent to open a vault?" she asked. 

The smugness faded. "I had prior obligations. As soon as I saw it, I figured it out. But I stalled to finish up a job I had for the Heros Clan. You have to know a job like that cannot be delayed."

"I'm not fond of the clans," Merlin said. "The five of them are like monsters lurking in the dark. I'd rather not involve myself in their nonsense."

"Nonsense?" I asked. 

"The posturing, the familial obligations, and the hoarding of resources. We were not meant to live forever. And a single person wasn't meant to have the power or the influence to shape entire countries. Not to mention some of those clans, if they weren't checked by the others, could control entire continents or even the world. I don't think any good comes of that level of power."

"Yet you yourself have that kind of power. Could you not walk into any of the current era's wars and settle them entirely on your own?"

"Oh, I certainly could," Merlin smirked. "But I don't. I learned my lesson the hard way. By helping install a king once long ago. Only for him to make a mess of things." She had a wistful expression that she physically shook off. "Never mind that. Shall we get back to exploring? Perhaps there are other interesting things from those pair of melons that you seem to be eyeing."

I raised an eyebrow at that. I hadn't been staring at her that hard. Only for my mind to go back to the melons I had found within the forest. "Right. Those. They were unripe. We'll have to circle back to them later."

The smirk on Merlin's face was so transparent that she had set me up for that one. "Come on, back to your feet. We have a whole forest to explore and barely any time to do it." She held out a hand. 

My leg had just finished regenerating. I took her hand, hopping back to my feet. Nodding in a direction after quickly sensing for something in my spatial ring. "Is that way away from the dinosaur?"

"It is indeed. Let's see what other treasures we can find," Merlin mused. 

I felt the ability activate again and I moved with her in lockstep essentially riding her ability. So that we could easily devour miles in moments.

As for why I chose that direction, the reason was quite simple. Using the talismans in my spatial ring, I believed I had found the direction of Simone and Gloria.

They seemed to be in roughly the same direction. However, my inscription was not connecting to Nyx, leading me to consider the possibility of multiple spaces for this trial. I couldn't understand why Simone and Gloria would be in one space and Nyx in another, but I had to work with the information I had.

***

Despite knowing the direction and Merlin's incredible ability to devour the ground with each step, I failed to find them by the end of the day. We did, however, manage to find three other unripened fruits, all guarded by monsters, and a few signs that other initiated had been in the area. Trees cut down by a sword, or blood left on the ground that hadn't yet disappeared were telltale signs. 

Eventually, we had to stop and call it a night. I found four pines close together and began working my inscription expertise and started working talismans into the trunks.

Merlin examined my work. "You're pretty good at this," she commented. 

"And why do you say that?" I asked. 

I was carving up the trees easily with a C-ranked knife, but the trees themselves weren't ranked. Or rather, the environment wasn't. Sometimes in higher-ranked instances, the environment would stand up to lower-ranked equipment. It was another test to prove that this wasn’t a real instance.

"Because you're not hesitating," she said. “Technically, inscription was not my forte. I was more interested in learning about magic than occasionally dabbling in alchemy. However I know enough to be curious, why are you using your blood?" she asked. 

"Would you believe me if I told you I infused it with so many herbs and reagents that at this point, I can use it for many simple inscriptions," I replied, continuing to bleed over it. 

"So it's an ability, and you don't want to tell me?" She saw right through my fabrication.

“Pretty much.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, and I could tell she was a moment away from inspecting me again before she looked away. "Fine, be that way. At least tell me what they do.”

“The hide our presence. Start with the basics. Vision, scent. But then move on to vibration and heat. I'm trying to make sure no matter what senses a monster in here might be using, they can't detect us.” I had learned more than once in my past life that vision was simply not enough, those were hard lessons. There were too many things with keen senses, particularly vibration. It was an incredibly difficult and costly one to mitigate, and you couldn't overdo it or it would look like a hollow spot and cause things to be curious. No, you just had to reduce vibrations over a certain amplitude. It made your footsteps look like small critters, and your breath seem like bugs in the air.

Merlin looked over the inscriptions again. 

"Well, that'll be incredibly helpful if you're doing that, and I should work on our housing." 

She waved her hands, and a stone slab rose out of the ground before four walls came up, and then a fifth one down the center, and a doorway at the front big enough for us to enter onto their side. 

"Oh,” I glanced at the divided room. “Trust me to be your ally but not sleep in the same room with you?"

Merlin narrowed her eyes. "That you would like to sleep in the same room proves enough that we shouldn't," she said before thickening that central wall. "I'd like to work with you, Bran. I really would. But a woman has to guard herself." 

I chuckled. "Oh, don't worry about me. I'd be more comfortable sleeping on my own. Think you could seal that door once we get in?" 

"I planned on it," she said.

I continued to work on the inscriptions and the four trees, getting lost in my work for a few minutes. 

"So, why this direction?” Merlin asked after a long moment of letting me work.

I'd finished three of the trees and now moved on to the fourth. "What do you mean? I just picked a direction at random," I didn’t explain the talismans. 

"No, you didn't," Merlin was quick to disagree. "Your brow furrowed, you looked down at your spatial ring, and then you picked a direction," she said, having clearly seen through me. 

"Fine. I gave the ladies I entered with talismans that I can use to currently sense the direction of two of them. I couldn't sense any of them when I first arrived into the forest, but I can sense them now. We're heading in their direction." 

Merlin nodded. "Thank you for being honest. I’m not concerned that you’ll be bringing allies into this situation.” 

“What about you, did you bring any subordinates?" I asked. 

She waved her hand. "I gave up on such things long ago. If I need someone to do a task, elementals are far more competent than most humans I can find." 

I recalled her commentary about people having too much power, and realized that in general Merlin did not like people. I chuckled to myself at that, and worked on finishing up the fourth inscription. People like Merlin were more common after the Rapture. Jaded by humanity's lack of, well, humanity. Presently there were enough shiny distractions, but when your life was just about survival small moments of selfishness caused massive rifts.

"Alright, all done." I finished up letting my blood run through it, and activating all four and once with a small pulse of mana.

They shined, briefly, before becoming a dull glow. And a thin barrier extended between all four, and then under our feet. 

Merlin stepped on the barrier, testing it.

"It's not physical," I told her. "It just is a semi-permeable barrier. You can walk through it, you can shoot through it. But sound, light, vibrations, even smells, are going to be limited in how they pass through." 

She stepped to the other side and widened her eyes. The woman would only see a projection of the other side. After a minute of examining it she nodded. "Good enough for me. Get into your room, and I'll close the walls," Merlin said, stepping into hers. With a little flick of her wrist, her spatial ring tossed down a thick, fluffy looking mattress. 

I ignored her, and moved into my own, ready to settle in.